Marie Curie

Maria
Sklodowska-Curie
(November 7, 1867- July 4, 1934) was a pioneer in the early field of radiation
and a Nobel laureate.

Born
in Warsaw, Poland, she moved to Paris and studied chemistry and physics at the
Sorbonne, where she became the first woman to teach there. At the Sorbonne she
met another instructor, Pierre Curie and married him; together they studied radioactive
materials, particularly the uranium ore pitchblende, which had the curious property
of being more radioactive than the uranium extracted from it. The logical explanation
of this was that the pitchblende contained traces of some unknown radioactive
component that was far more radioactive than uranium. Over several years of unceasing
labour they refined several tons of pitchblende, progressively concentrating the
radioactive components, and eventually isolated two new chemical elements. The
first they named polonium after Marie's native country, and the other was named
radium from its intense radioactivity.

Together
with Pierre Curie and Henri Becquerel, she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics,
1903: "in recognition of the extraordinary services they have rendered by their
joint researches on the radiation phenomena discovered by Professor Henri Becquerel".
She was the first woman to be awarded a Nobel Prize.

Eight
years later, she received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, 1911 "in recognition of
her services to the advancement of chemistry by the discovery of the elements
radium and polonium, by the isolation of radium and the study of the nature and
compounds of this remarkable element". In an unusual move, Curie intentionally
did not patent the radium isolation process, instead leaving it open so the scientific
community could research unhindered.

She
was the first person to win or share two Nobel Prizes. She is one of only two
people who has been awarded a Nobel Prize in two different fields, the other being
Linus Pauling.

After
her husband's death, she had an affair with physicist Paul Langevin, a married
man, which resulted in a press scandal, sometimes reeking of xenophobia.

During
World War I, she pushed for the use of mobile radiography units for the treatment
of wounded soldiers. In 1921, she did a tour of the United States, where she was
welcomed triumphantly, to raise funds for research on radium.

In
her later years, she was disappointed by the myriad of physicians and makers of
cosmetics who used radioactive material without precautions.

Her
death near Sallanches, France in 1934 was from leukemia, almost certainly due
to her massive exposure to radiation in her work.

Her
eldest daughter, Irène Joliot-Curie, won a Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1935,
the year after Marie Curie's death.

In
1995, Madame Curie was the first woman laid to rest under the famous dome of The
Panthéon in Paris on her own merits.

During
a period of hyperinflation in the 1990s, she was on the Polish 20,000-zloty banknote.

There is a biographical
film about her. An extremely ahistorical Marie Curie appears as a character in
the comedy Young Einstein by Yahoo Serious.